All gunners were deaf, they said. They were the kings of the battlefield and they never heard the applause.
Sometimes, rarely, a battery would pause. The smoke would clear slowly from its front and the officers would peer at their target. The British had been stopped.
The red lines were cowering in the crops, hiding behind stone walls or crouching in ditches filthy with the summer’s rain. The gunners knew the British were beaten. No troops in the world would dare advance into the horror of round-shot and canister that the guns poured into the killing ground.
For the British it was a nightmare of sound. The round-shot rumbled like giant barrels on planks overhead, the canister whistled, the screams of the wounded riding over it all. The musket balls from the broken canister rattled on stone or cracked through corn or thudded into flesh and always there was the rolling thunder from the white cloud ahead. Sometimes, when a gun was short of shot or canister, a shell would be fired instead. The shell would land in the broken crops. It would spin, its fuse smoking wildly, then the casing would crack apart in flame, smoke and iron fragments to add to the noise of death.
The British died in ones and twos. They sheltered where they could, but sheltering men won no battles. Yet these men could not go forward. No man could go into that storm of shot. They crouched, they lay in shallow scoops of land, they cursed their officers, they cursed their General, they cursed the French, they cursed the slow, -crawling time, and they cursed the lack of help on the plain’s edge. They were alone in a storm of death and they could see no help. The Colours were shredded with shot.
The lucky ones were in the small village, the first village of the plain, for there the stone walls were a shield. Even so, some roundshot smashed the houses flat, carving bloody paths in the packed rooms, and always the air outside the hovels was loud with the sound of death.
The attack was stalled.
`We have him, by God, we have him!’ Marshal Jourdan, who like all the French Marshals had begun to think of Wellington as unbeatable, knew that his enemy had underestimated him. Jourdan guessed that Wellington, secure for the first time by having greater numbers than the French, had committed his army to a frontal attack. The guns, the pride of the French army, were shredding the enemy.
He looked north. A few English cavalrymen were in sight on the river’s far bank and the sight of them had alarmed some of his officers. Jourdan clapped his hands for attention and raised his voice.
`Gentlemen! The cavalry is a feint! If they planned to attack from there they would have done so already! They want us to weaken our left! We shall not!’
Indeed, he strengthened it. The reserves who guarded the northern river bank were marched south, behind the Arinez Hill, to reclaim the Puebla Heights. Jourdan planned more for them. When the British broke, and when he unleashed his lancers and sabres onto the killing ground, the men from the heights could sweep down to block the defile. The
British, broken and bloodied, would be trapped. But first, Jourdan knew, he must let Wellington send more men onto the plain, more men to be killed and cut off, more corpses and prisoners for the Emperor’s glory. Jourdan knew he` must wait. In another two hours, perhaps, the heights would be retaken and the moment would have come when he would destroy Wellington’s reputation for ever. The Marshal called for food, for a little wine. Another two hours, he thought, and he would send the Eagles forward to take Spain back for France. He smiled at King Joseph. `I trust, sir, you have invited no one to sit on your right this evening?’
Joseph frowned in puzzlement, not understanding why Jourdan spoke about the victory feast which had been ordered in Vitoria. `I hope you will take that place of honour, my dear Marshal.’
Jourdan laughed. `I shall be pursuing the enemy, sir, but you may have the Lord Wellington to entertain. I hear he likes mutton.’